"The Blue Bird Clinic"
Matt's pediatrician gave me a list of
clinics and a few brochures to look at and sent me home to talk to my
husband about them. After looking through everything and talking to
several people we decided on the Blue Bird Circle Clinic in Houston, we
really liked the way they did things. Instead of depending on one
doctor's diagnosis the Blue Bird Clinic involved several, all specializing
in different things. After all the testing is done they all get
together and discuss the results, it doesn't end until they are all in
agreement of a diagnosis. Now actually getting in there was
something else! The parents can't call and make an
appointment....the pediatrician's office makes the call, gives the clinic
the info they have then the clinic mails the parents a questionnaire to
fill out. Not a small questionnaire mind you, but pages upon pages!
After you send that back to them they review it and decide if it
sounds like a neurological problem (they won't accept a child strictly on a
suspected diagnosis of ADHD, it has to be accompanied by something else).
If you are accepted they mail an appointment to you and some
information on what's going to happen.
Matt had 3 appointments, each about 2-3
hours long, each spaced 2 weeks apart. The first was a 2 hour
medical exam, the second was a 3 hour psychological exam, where they tested
him on both verbal and non-verbal levels, and the third was our
consultation. There we met the people who had been working on Matt's
case, the head neurologist, a resident neurologist, a social worker, a
psychologist and two others that I can't remember what they did. They
explain in more detail about the tests and what all they had been doing and
why, then proceeded to tell us that first off, everyone was in complete
agreement that Matt was, without a doubt, ADHD. Ok, no surprises for
us there, that we knew, we just needed a doctor to make it official, done.
Now for the part we dreaded....YES, he was PDD-NOS,
BUT....they weren't going to "officially" diagnose him just yet,
they wanted to see if there were any improvements after one year in a
structured school setting. The social worker had already made the
arrangements with the school and gave us the name and number of the woman I
needed to talk to to get him in early childhood classes. So Matt was
started on medication, plans for another evaluation at the end of the
school year were made and we were sent home with little less than a year to
see if Matt improved enough to avoid getting the "official diagnosis".
"School years"
By the time the Blue Bird appointments
were over we had one week to do and get all we had to in order to get Matt
into school on time, I'm not sure how it happened, but we made it, he was
there on the first day.
Early childhood classes were good for
Matt,
he went only a few hours a day and they taught him basic life skills.
It all went pretty good, no major problems other than a constant fight
with his medication. I can't remember what meds he was on and when,
but we went through an extremely short stint with ritalin (caused facial tics),
and since then,
chlonodine, meliryl,cylert and finally adderall (which he's currently
on).
In kindergarten he was in a contained special
ed classroom
where he did pretty good except for getting frustrated really easy,
resulting
in a lot of calls home. (While all of this was going on we went back to Blue Bird where Matthew got his "official" diagnosis of PDD-NOS.) Now I can't remember why, but for some
behavioral
reason he was held back a grade at this time and had to repeat kindergarten
which didn't go over too well with anyone. I had been teaching him at
home
as much as I could and he knew everything he needed to know to pass all but
the
last 6 weeks of kindergarten the first time through, now here he was
going
to have to do it all over again! Ok, he was kind of bored with this, having to do the same things that he already knew over again, to make things more frustrating for him, I ok'ed it for him to be put half
day
in a regular classroom where things were much more strict than he was used
to.
Things didn't go to well at all! I was being called to come get him
about
3 to 4 times a week, he spent most of his time in the office for
misbehaving in
class.
To make things worse, the school was using the color coded
conduct
system and Matt was staying at red so much that he began to associate the
color
red to being bad and being in trouble. Anything red would send him
flying
off in a rage. In his own words, anything red was bad, evil and had to die! So much so that he even took his sister's red beta fish out of it's aquarium and mutilated it! Because in his mind it was evil and wasn't worth loving.
Sadly, this is the same way he felt about himself. He told me that he was so bad that he knew his family couldn't love him! Nothing I said would convince him otherwise. We ended up letting him stay with his grandmother for a few days to see if he would calm down any. It didn't work, in fact, we had to "trick" him to get him back home. It was a heart breaking time for all of us!
Things got so bad that I had to pull him out of school and call the school psychologist, who immediately called an ARD where it was decided he would go to another public school where they felt the people were more able to deal with Matt and help him. Unfortunately it didn't work out that way, Matt just could not
function in
an environment where people actually expected him to behave a certain way
and where
he was expected to do what he was supposed to do instead of him doing what he wanted to. No one seemed to be able to find a way of dealing with him.
